“Who knew people ate with silverware and china plates. For 11 ¹/₂ years my dinner was pizza from a cardboard box. A main dish was multicolored DOTS in a yellow box. Once I had two boxes but all those red colored ones plugged up my stomach. Now, suddenly, 7 o’clock gives me a whole other life.

“In olden days I did CNN 8 o’clock weekends. But everyone in Washington, DC, leaves weekends, so I never saw anyone.

“Now, done at 8 p.m., I can join meals and parties already in progress. Going to a sit-down is great because by the time I arrive food’s put right down in front of me, so it’s fast.

“Not sure I’d have signed another 10 p.m. deal. We stayed Number One but 7 p.m.’s a whole new audience that’s interested in a political schedule. At 10 at night they’re ready for bed. With this deal I got a big raise. Yet for months I was trashed in stories about how I’m being pushed away.

“Listen, my lawyer husband John Coale and I are married since ’79. He’s had his health scare. We’re keeping strong, knowing what’s important. He’s fine now, but we had things so bad for six years.”

Tea time with the countess

Countess No. 8 to call “Downton Abbey’s” Highclere Castle home is Lady Fiona Carnarvon. After touring Colonial Williamsburg’s New World history, she’s here for her new book on countess No. 6, “Lady Catherine, the Earl and the Real Downton Abbey.” Over tea and tuna at my house she said why her reception today is at Christie’s.

“Wealthy Lady Catherine was a Rothschild. In 1926, she sold her inherited fortune in art to save Highclere. Christie’s held that sale of the century.”

“It’s 1,300 years old. The country’s biggest lived-in castle. The diningroom seats 48. The kitchen’s been in the same place 1,000 years. Our oldest staff member’s in his 90s. I’m from London but had never heard of it. Now I’m passionate about it.

“It’s 300 rooms but only one small TV in the library, which doesn’t work half the time. Our seven big dogs eat the controls. To watch television my son goes to my sister Sarah’s London house.”

Blond, blue-eyed stunning Lady Carnarvon met hubby the Earl “at a dinner party. We discussed poetry.” Then she moved into a living archive, a “Downton Abbey” TV show and a lifestyle “where 8:30 every morning I play tennis with friends, then we have cappuccino. If it rains we just do the cappuccino.”

And what happens after this TV show? “I’m not sure where the path will go.”

Odds & ends

Now considered the best-dressed of Hollywow’s hoo-hahs, Lupita Nyong’o, who nobody knew an hour ago: “Sudden fame is starting to sneak up on me.” . . . TRIBECA’S Film Festival doing a “Future of Films” live panel series with Oscar/Emmy awardee Aaron Sorkin . . . EVERYBODY’S doing something. Richard Gere and CBS weatherdude Lonnie Quinn dress up a St. Jude benefit the 27th.

A look back

Robert Wagner’s Viking book “You Must Remember This,” out in March, is lookback nostalgia. When things were classy. Dropping names like Chaplin, Sinatra, Garland, Chasen’s, the Brown Derby — people and places now gone — he says stuff like: “The quantum difference between then and now, how we lived our private lives during the last gasp of radiance that was the studio system . . . has vanished as surely as birchbark canoes. I want to do this before the colors fade.”

A guy sliding on slush near his building: “So much frozen snow under foot you can fall right on your ice.”